In early December, we walked around a cemetery, drank lots of whisky, threw some thought grenades, and talked about money and membership. Another day, another We Are Open Co-op meeting.

But this one was different. For a start, it was the first time Bryan and Laura had met IRL. Thanks to the hospitality of Bryan and his family, we held it over two and a half days in the South London Mathers mansion.

The plan was to arrive on the first day (Laura was flying in from Germany, the rest of us from different parts of England) and ‘swallow the frog’. That is to say, we front-loaded the agenda with boring but important stuff we need to talk about. We’re all big-picture kind of people, so we forced ourselves into the weeds of detail before getting to the exciting stuff.

Membership

While walking around the local cemetery, we discussed membership of our co-op, as well as money. Two things we tend to punt to the future any time they come up in our weekly meetings. It doesn’t look like much, but the few bullet points we ended up putting down on this wiki page summarise plenty of debate about membership! We’ll use these bullets to build out a resource. Issue is filed.

Money money money

On the financial side of things, we set down the order of priority in which the money in the central co-op ‘pot’ would be allocated. Our guiding principles where members being paid for co-op work is concerned are:

  • In-person meetings take precedence over those that happen online
  • Expenses are always paid before day rates

We build in a 25% co-op pot to what we charge clients. This will be shared out in the following way at the end of the financial year:

  1. Six-monthly meetups in person (in person — travel expenses + paid days at co-op rate)
  2. Monthly co-op days (online — paid days at co-op rate)
  3. General co-op work (online — paid days at co-op rate)
  4. Stuff members go to (in person — travel expenses + paid days at co-op rate)

This is on our Wiki as well.

Members vs Clients

We had a discussion about how we talk to Co-op members vs Co-op clients. We made the decision that WeAreOpen.Coop is a client facing portal, while members are invited to look behind the curtain on Github. Actually, anyone can look behind the curtain (we are, ahem, open), but the messy and the tailored serve different purposes.

On the one hand, we want to help clients push their understanding of openness and design experiences and programs that help organisations embed the culture and processes of open.

Then there are people and organisations who aim to further the discussion of the economic model that is designed to create equity and growth for members.

Thought Grenades

We talked about how to respond to things we see happening in the digital literacy and open work conversations. We played around with the idea of using “thought grenades” to market our services, but also to have an opinion….

Badge Building

We issued the Co-op Curious badge to everyone who attended the meetup.

To advocate for the International Co-op principles, we decided that we should offer a set of badges. We started with principles 5, 6, and 7 and came up with an initial set of badges, which you can read about in our new coop-badges repo.

We also decided that we would design and run Badge Bootcamp, an email course + live workshops to help people get started with open badges. It’s still in development, but you can already sign up — we’ll be launching the bootcamp in early 2017. Additionally, you can sign up for the new biweekly Badge News, sponsored by Badgr, Credly and Open Badge Factory.

It was great to see people turn up for the co-op meetup we held at The Ivy House, a co-operatively owned pub not too far away from Bryan’s house. We may have had quite a lot of whisky. We blame the Raspberry Pi Foundation guys…

Coming up next…

This post has gotten rather long, and we’re short-handing! We roadmapped the next 6 months of co-op bizniz though, and have even more things on the horizon. We’ll launch a monthly We Are Open Co-op newsletter, do a series of webinars with the Educators Co-op, try to establish shared infrastructures for co-ops, run some workshops, set up an “ask us anything”, establish a production based community call for co-ops and more.

Doug, Laura, Bryan and John are never short on ideas. The We Are Open Co-op is going big in 2017. So reach out, let’s do stuff together. Get in touch!

Final note: as is required any time you have an American who lives in Germany come to England, we took Laura for fish and chips. She likes mushy peas.